The Nixon Tapes

Warts and all

You can listen to hour after hour of a key 20th Century figure at his best, worst and most plainly indifferent: in all his undisguised brilliance, skullduggery, vanity, self-pity, bigotry, discussion of the shattering and clandestine opening of relations with the People's Republic of China, deceiving of colleagues, frustrations over the Vietnam War, sophisticated takes on domestic policy and dealings with family.

August 08, 2004|By James Warren, a Tribune deputy managing editor.

An agreement led to the ongoing processing, indexing, deleting of certain material and making public the tapes--which span February 1971 to July 1973, when the Watergate investigation was in full swing and Nixon shut down the system. They sit at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md., just outside the capital, and do not come with transcripts.

The archivists do the initial processing in chronological order and have about 1,800 hours left. National security officials and a representative of the Nixon estate weigh in too, under guidelines accepted by all. It will take several more years to finish.

While the archivists prepare an index of each tape, indicating the time, individuals involved and subjects covered, the lack of ready-made transcripts may explain how little time is spent dissecting this unparalleled resource. And, unlike the much smaller array of Lyndon Johnson tapes, which are all phone conversations and have received ample play on media outlets such as C-SPAN, Nixon's are mostly room conversations.

That means the sound quality is often lousy. It takes tremendous concentration and a willingness to hit the stop, rewind and play buttons on your recorder many, many times to figure out certain sentences. I have often listened to the same conversation 10 or 20 times, been convinced I've finally got it cold, then listened one more time, only to learn that I botched a key word, changing the meaning of an important sentence.

Then there are times I just throw up my hands. There's an intriguing conversation in which Nixon wonders what his position on abortion would be if one of his daughters became pregnant and didn't want the child. But glasses are clinking in the Oval Office, drowning out certain words, and I gave up.

Historian Korr's book on the baseball players union recounts an important 1969 meeting in which Curt Flood, a St. Louis Cardinals outfielder contesting the legality of his being traded to Philadelphia, spoke to the union's executive committee about the reserve system making players slaves to one team in an era before free agency.

Korr has interviewed people there but can never really be sure. He'd love to have heard side comments as Flood spoke or known how sympathetic people really did sound. He'd love to have Nixon-like tapes.

But, even then, would you have the whole story?

"You still have to use the tapes with caution," said Kutler, who was party to the controversy that ultimately brought the Nixon tapes into the public arena.

So if you hear a frustrated Nixon talking of dropping an A-bomb on the North Vietnamese, you have to realize it was an isolated comment, made out of pure frustration. He had already decided he was going to pull out of Vietnam.

Similarly, the spate of nasty remarks about blacks is there, Kutler said, but so is the evidence of Nixon's substantial achievements in desegregating Southern schools. Ditto remarks ridiculing environmentalists, even outright contempt from the man who gave us the Environmental Protection Agency.

It's a shame the tapes sit so lonely. But if you do inspect them, even 30 years after his resignation, proceed with caution. As in all our lives, there are gaps between the public and private.